January 17 — A Remembrance

It was a Monday in mid-January of 1995, and as a daily newspaper reporter I had an appointment scheduled for the next day to interview some local activist group. For some reason I can’t remember now, I had been hoping to get out of doing the interview and thought to myself: A big disaster would be about the only way to knock this off my schedule for the day....

No lie; that is just the way it happened. The next morning, almost as if I had jinxed myself (and a whole lot of other people), that “big disaster” came to pass.

Before I felt it, I heard it. It was about 5:45 the next morning, a Tuesday, January 17, and I had my alarm set for 6:00 a.m. I was lingering in that space between sleep and waking up. Then, off in the distance, I heard this low rumbling sound growing closer and louder. The only thing I can compare it to is the sound of a massive herd of buffalo coming straight at you, just like you see in American movies.

When that rumbling thunder sound reached us, our four-story apartment building began rocking violently. At first I wasn’t bothered by it, having grown up on the west coast of the United States and endured earthquakes before. But as the intensity of the earthquake kept growing and I could actually feel our whole building teetering to one side and then the other on its foundations, back and forth, like some leaning Tower of Pisa, I sat straight up and thought, That’s it, we’re going down.

My wife screamed and our son (then only six months old) woke up crying. The sound of things falling, crashing and breaking in our apartment filled our ears. Though it seemed like forever, it actually lasted for about 20 seconds. Just as suddenly as the rolling thunder had arrived, it retreated back into the distance and our hearts started beating again.

As any survivor will tell you, one second in earthquake time feels like one hour in regular time, and that was the loooongest 20 seconds I’ve ever lived through. The apartment was still standing with only minor damage, thank God, but I knew by the sheer force of the quake that if it had continued on even a few seconds longer, our small building would no doubt have tipped over and the overall damage from the quake would have been much worse for many other people too. Later I heard some Japanese experts confirm exactly that.

The thing that really saved us, it seemed, was that we had chosen a fairly new concrete-made apartment building to move into after we got married and started our new family. Many of our neighbors were not so lucky. Those who lived in older apartments or older Japanese-style houses with wooden frames and heavy ceramic tile roofs (built under outdated earthquake codes) saw their dwellings collapse like matchsticks — in many cases, burying the occupants alive. Although I had always loved those kinds of traditional Japanese homes and dreamed of living in one someday, I was glad at that moment that we had chosen a more modern, quake-resistant-type of building to live in.

We were now isolated, in any case, from the rest of Japan and its modern conveniences. The quake left us without any electricity, water, gas or phone hook-up. That first day, our only lifeline to the outside world was a battery-operated radio.

As the hours dragged on, we caught the news and could hear just how bad things were in the central Kobe area: a magnitude 6.8 quake that had done major damage to buildings, and traffic and port infrastructure. Though we were living at the time in the nearby city of Nishinomiya, which was also hard-hit, we were located on the eastern edge of the quake zone and were thus spared a much worse fate than those who lived closer to Kobe.

The first night or two after the quake we lit the apartment by candlelight. With gas and water supplies now gone, we had to fend for ourselves in search of broken water mains in the area, fill up big containers with water, then lug them back up three flights of stairs — several times a day. You never appreciate how much water is used in an average toilet flush until you’ve been in a disaster like that. We learned very quickly the art of conserving everything as a matter of survival.

In the meantime, the phone line was dead silent with no incoming or outgoing calls possible. One of the first few phone calls that miraculously managed to get through to us in the days following the quake came not from inside Japan, but from overseas. I answered the phone in Japanese, expecting to hear a Japanese voice answer back. I was instead greeted with a few seconds of silence and crackling on the line, a sure sign that it was an international call. “Brian?” a gravelly voice said on the other end. “It’s Roger Tatarian.”

It was indeed “Mr. T” — a journalism instructor from my university days, and a former chief editor of UPI news service — and he was now calling from Fresno, California to see if we were all right. I assured him we were fine and thanked him for taking the time to check up on us. His phone call out of the blue that day cheered us up considerably and injected some much-needed sunshine into the depressing days that followed the Great Hanshin Earthquake (as it was officially being called), as the death toll climbed ever higher and people struggled to mentally and physically deal with the death and destruction all around them.

Roger Tatarian passed away in Fresno about six months later at age 78, but I don’t think Mr. T ever knew just how much his concern and phone call that day had meant to us.

The ensuing days, weeks and months here in Japan left me deeply impressed as well. I saw firsthand the heartbreaking effects that a force of nature can have on people’s lives. I reported a series of stories for my newspaper on the disaster, but it was always much more than just a “hot news” story like it was for my news editors in the bigger cities of Osaka or Tokyo. I always approached people respectfully and sympathetically as a fellow victim of the quake, not as just another reporter exploiting them for a story.

In the quake’s aftermath I saw many local Japanese residents extending a helpful hand to each other in gestures of kindness that I hadn’t seen before (or since). I was deeply impressed by the concern that emerged from people’s hearts for their fellow victims, and I too made sure to help out local people who lost much more in their lives than we had. Sometimes it just takes a disaster of such devastating proportions to bring out the best in people. That was certainly the case in the big Kobe quake of January 17, 1995, which ended up claiming more than 6,000 lives in a mere 20 seconds.

And so, this is in remembrance of all the people we knew personally from that time, 20 years ago: Some of them lived through the experience with us, and some died in the disaster. Those who survived it have grown up and grown older, including our six-month-old son, who today has reached adulthood. Those who were not lucky enough to make it out of the disaster alive are often in my thoughts and prayers, even after all these years.

May they all rest in peace, for they are not forgotten.

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